How Attentive Are Audiences to the Stories of Superhero Films, Really?

Reading Alan Moore's comments about the politics of the superhero film, and what he thinks may be behind the genre's box office popularity, I thought again of a comment by another figure who pointedly satirized the superhero film--Alejandro Inarritu in an interview he gave after making Birdman. He remarked that as both director and father to two daughters he has noticed how they, as representatives of the younger generation, "watch films," and his conclusion about the matter has been that younger viewers especially, but perhaps viewers generally to the extent that they have been taught to experience film in this way, "don't care what it's about. And when you ask them what it's about two weeks later, they don't know. They don't care. It's just about the visuals, the spectacle."

Of course, that is what high concept filmmaking has been all about since its advent a half century ago (evident already in the '60s-era James Bond films, increasingly dominant within Hollywood film from the mid-'70s on), and it seems to me useful to think of superheroes in terms of that. I have generally seen the success of superheroes in recent decades as primarily a cinematic phenomenon, with superhero films as prominent as they are because they fit the demands of commercial film-making so well--their being exceptionally convenient material for spectacular yet accessible sci-fi action spectacle-based franchises--rather than their narratives, whose actual effect on or relevance for most of the public may be slighter than many cultural commentators seem to appreciate. Still, it does not seem unreasonable to acknowledge that those narratives have, at the least, not been a barrier to such success, that they can and do echo other tendencies in the culture--and maybe some effect on a viewer even as they experience the movie as little more than the bombardment of their nervous system by light and sound for two-and-a-half hours, however unconscious.